Tall Tales in Talesberg
by aura-seer1234
Summary: Welcome to Talesberg, a city where the unexpected is completely expected. Johnny Loughran arrives in town to live with his cousin Merida and is met with an alarming mystery, who is responsible for the disappearance of Rapunzel Corona? Was it murder? A Kidnapping? What happened to her? Johnny watches as Merida, Jack and Hiccup search for the truth over the coming school year.


Jonathan Loughran loved the train, he loved the sputtering, choked sound it made as it heaved itself forward along the tracks and he loved the inherent social nature of the experience. This time was different though, this time he stared out the window with his headphones on underneath his hoodie with a scowl, avoiding eye contact with everyone. He watched snow covered farmers fields roll past, inhabited by cows and horses. He spotted a fox as the train went through a wooded bit but was too sullen to get excited about it. Three words kept running through his mind, _you're an embarrassment._ His mother said that before he left, it was the second last thing she said to him before he left. Shortly after, his father told him that he would be going to Talesberg to live with his uncle Fergus. He didn't know what to expect when he arrived at the train station, he had never been to Talseberg only ever seeing his aunt and uncle and cousins when they came to his place for family reunions. He knew he liked them, he knew that his aunt Elinor was stricter than his mother and that Fergus was a lot more…intense than his father but it had been years since he had seen either. They seemed to like him when they had been there…but he wondered if they would like him now.

He turned his head and stared at the back of the seat in front of him, biting his lip to hold back the tears. He didn't mean to do any of it, it had been the night of the winter formal, just before the last day of school before winter break (which used to be called christmas break and still was but was officially changed in order to be more inclusive.) Johnny got dressed up and showed up to the pre-dance party at Emily Vanderberg's house. She had a big house and absent parents so parties always ended up there. Johnny would have offered to have it at his place but he knew his parents would never allow it. Hell would have to freeze over first.

Johnny had a huge crush on Emily Vanderberg but no expectations that anything might happen between them. He never fantasized about getting with her, whether that was because he lacked the self esteem to imagine they may be together or his feelings were just that pure, he couldn't say. He would prefer to say that it was the first but he knew in his heart that it was probably the later. It was because of these feelings though, that he did what he did, he wanted to impress her or at least the people she was friends with. The cool kids, the popular ones. He had never been unpopular but never quite so popular as to be in the inner circle. It should be noted, that these kids were not the prim and proper popular kids, they were the dangerous ones. Anyone who has been to High school at any point knows that there are two popular crowds, the greasers and the preps. Johnny was no greaser but he was more greaser than prep. He didn't care about popularity but he did care about Emily. When he arrived at her house, she answered the door, he smiled and she smiled back, "hey you!" she said, her lips were dark purple and her eyes were heavy with makeup. He felt a pang in his chest, which was new.

"Hey," he said to her with a grin, he lifted a bottle of Champaign he had stolen from his dad's liqueur cabinet by the neck "brought a holiday gift." He heard glass breaking inside the house and laughed, "sounds like a riot in there!"

She laughed and wiped at her eyes, "yeah, a real riot."

He frowned, "is everything okay?" he asked.

She shook her head with a smile, "yeah it's fine. Stop frowning Johnny, it makes your face look weird."

"It does?" he said, frowning deeper, really milking it.

She laughed, lightly punching his arm with a fingerless black lace gloved hand, "you're so fucking weird you know."

"It's my best quality," he said with a grin.

She didn't say anything to that. She just took the champaign bottle from him and jerked her head at him to follow her into the house, "c'mon, we'll get you a drink weirdo," she said. He followed her in through the foyer and into the living room where two couples were making out on her couch and seven people were trying to play beer pong on her coffee table, not to mention all the others just milling about. He followed her through the living room and into the dining room where more people were playing beer pong and into the kitchen.

He whistled, "nice, did people bring all this?" he said gesturing to what was now practically a bar on the kitchen Island.

"No, it's all my dads," she said, opening a bottle of vodka, grabbing a red solo cup.

"Again? Have you gotten in trouble yet for drinking all his booze?" he laughed, leaning on the counter.

She laughed, pouring an absurd amount of vodka into the cup and then grabbing a can of diet coke from the counter. "This isn't all his booze, he's got more…fuck, he has more."

"Emily?" he said softly, touching her shoulder, "look, if something's up, you can tell me. Whatever it is, I won't hold it against you. I have this massive crush on you, remember?"

She wiped at her eyes again, he couldn't see tears but he imagined they were coming, "yeah, look, all I want is to just get drunk and have a nice night at the dance, okay?"

His brows furrowed up and his heart ached. "Okay," he said. She poured the coke into the cup and handed it to him. He had two more of that exact drink before he left, he got into an argument with a friend over vampire movies and for whatever reason, found himself as the driver to the highschool dance. By some miracle they were let in and they danced the night away, right up until the dance was over.

When they opened the doors up to the outside they were surprised to see it had snowed. There were hoots and hollers and they all ran out through the parking lot to the hill that dipped into the football field. Some of them rolled down which looked like a lot of fun. There was just one person missing. Emily.

He turned around and saw her crumpled to the ground, next to his car, sobbing. He ran up to her as best he could in his tipsy state. He dropped to his knees and held her. "Please," he begged her, "please tell me what's wrong."

"My dad's coming home, I don't want him to come home," she said, between choked sobs.

"Why? What did you do?"

"You'll be so disgusted with me, you're the only one who isn't disgusted with me right now."

He put the pieces together in his mind, he wasn't even sure if they were the right pieces and he couldn't even remember exactly what happened after she told him what her father had been doing to her. He remembered his arms falling off of her and feeling a fire engulfing every bone in his body, his jaw clenching and that pang in his chest becoming the thundering pounding of a drum. Everything was bass notes ad screeching. "I have to go," he said, "can I have the keys to your dad's car?" She gave them to him. The next thing he knew was that he had driven her father's priceless Lambourghini into the playground equipment of some daycare. The car was totalled. The police arrived and he was arrested at around three in the morning.

Emily's father came in to visit him and Johnny told him that it was payback for what he did to Emily. Her father told him that he wouldn't press charges for the car but he had to keep his mouth shut about it. Johnny said he would if he never touched Emily again. Johnny's official story about what happened would be that he was bitter that Emily didn't like him back and that he got so drunk that he crashed the car.

Things at home were completely awful after that and his mother could barely stand to look at him. He knew if he could tell them the truth they might understand. When his mother picked him up from the police station, she didn't say a word. When they got into the car she told him the three words that had been echoing in his head for the past three weeks, "You're an embarrassment," she said, a whisper through gritted teeth.

He had fights with his parents before but they had never called him an embarrassment and shipped him off to live with other people. Still…if all this meant that Emily was free, wasn't it worth it? It could sting something fierce but if she was free, that would be fine. He was willing to give up a few things to make that happen. Besides, maybe one day the truth would get out or maybe this whole thing was the star of some grand adventure. The thought had him smiling, just a little at first but the smile grew and grew. "A coming of age adventure story staring me."

The old lady sitting next to him sighed and rolled her eyes, "why am I always seated next to the crazy people," she said. she flipped to the next page in her newspaper and crossed her legs. Johnny sighed and shook his head with a smile, looking back out the window. There was no reason why this had to be a bad thing, no reason this couldn't be a coming of age story staring him.

"Hey lady," he asked, pulling his earbuds out and pulling his hood off, "what other kinds of crazy have you been seated next too?"

"All the same kinds of crazy, mostly young men like you who start talking to themselves. Men talk a lot and young men even more so." She said, eyes narrowed and lips pursed, not looking at him.

He chuckled and looked back out the window. It was winter still, early January which meant he was starting school right after the winter break. He wondered if people knew they were going to have a transfer student or if the city of Talesberg was too big for anything like that to be noticed. It seemed to be tucked away in the wilderness and yet the tracks were still pretty solid. He had been to places out in the boonies before but the tracks there always got loud and scratchy and the train always got shaky. He wasn't having that problem. "Are you headed to Talesberg?" he asked the old lady.

"I don't see how that's any of your business," she said cooly. Johnny was usually quite persistent but even he knew when to take a hint. He looked around the interior of the train car. It was long, obviously, and packed tightly with sets of two seats on either side of the car. Along the middle was an aisle with a retro printed carpet, a strip of the same blue and burgundy carpet was fixed on the ceiling of the car and of course, either side was lined with windows.

He wished that his seating partner wasn't so…reserved, it would have been nice to share the train experience with someone else. He didn't want to be caught staring at her but he watched her from the corner of his eye. She wore a dark blue winter coat that she hadn't taken off since she got on the train and had dense, grey curls held back from her face in a bushy ponytail. He could tell that she had been quite a looker back in the day, as it stood she was a very beautiful, if cold, old lady. She contrasted his get up pretty starkly between his bright orange jacket he had shrugged off and his red hoodie and red hair. "Do you ever talk to people on the train?" he asked, unable to sit in silence, using this as a last ditch effort to get some kind of conversation going. Maybe she was just bitter because she was sad and lonely. Considering what he went through, he could relate. Hell, maybe she could even become his wise old mentor character.

"Life isn't a movie child," she said, turning her icy blue gaze on him, he shivered involuntarily, it was like she had burrowed into his soul and read his mind. He crept away from her as far as he could on his seat. "The world doesn't work like that. Strangers aren't friends you have yet to meet, strangers are more likely to be the cause of the bumps in the night and that feeling you get as if you're being watched but no one's around. Keep talking to strangers like that and you're going to get hurt. Especially in Talesberg."

"So…" he said, "you are headed to Talesberg?" he said.

"I'm not," she said, "but you are."

He gulped. The train intercom came on, "we will be approaching the city of Talesberg in about five minutes. Passengers disembarking at this stop are invited to retrieve luggage from the overhead compartments and line up for the exit. We thank you for choosing T.T. Rail and hope you had a pleasant journey," said a kind sounding voice. He couldn't tell if it was a man or a woman but he supposed that didn't really matter.

"Well," he said, "this is my stop." He rubbed the back of his neck and hastily put on his winter jacket. The woman stood up and stepped to the side, wordlessly. He slid out of the seats and reached up for the overhead compartments, opening the latch and pulling out his back pack. The rest of his luggage was in the baggage car, he checked it in before boarding the train. Johnny wasn't a very tall guy being about five foot eight, but he felt particularly short standing next to the woman who was close to six feet. She had to be. "Uh…have a pleasant trip," he said with a strained smile as he put the back pack on and walked down the aisle to stand in line to exit the train. He'd never met anyone like that woman.

He rolled his shoulders and his neck, focusing on happy thoughts. Not his mother. Not Emily. Not the woman. He thought instead about uncle Fergus and aunt Elinor. He remembered very suddenly that they had a daughter his age, Merida. The thought made him smile, it would be fun living with someone his own age, it would be like having a sister or something. The train came to a stop and the clerk opened up the latch and the steps off the train swung out. Johnny was finally at the beginning of his new adventure. This was going to be a good thing, at the very least, things couldn't get any worse.


End file.
